By Danny Paul, Pastor • Grace Baptist Church, Russellville
Do you feel the need to grow in your ability to interact with people who are struggling around you? Do you wrestle with the philosophical assumptions of our culture and how they shape the way we understand people? If you would answer yes to these questions, I would like to invite you to the Care of Souls Conference at Central Baptist College on Jan. 31, 2026. This event is free and would be helpful for pastors, Sunday School teachers, small group leaders and Christians who want to care for others. This conference will be an introduction to biblical counseling. Sessions will address questions such as:
• What is biblical counseling?
• Why is the church the place for counseling?
• What does the Bible really say about life change?
• What about problems like depression and anxiety?
We will also offer a session featuring real pastoral case examples, showing how biblical counseling can function within the life of a local church.
I have personal reasons to study biblical counseling. The struggles I have experienced are common to ministry. And I know I’m not alone — many of you could share similar stories.
I did not always have an interest in counseling, though. When I was a student at Central Baptist College, my degree required a counseling class. Honestly, I wasn’t interested in counseling because I assumed preaching and teaching would be the heart of my ministry, so counseling felt secondary. God had different plans.
After graduation, I served in a few different churches. I began to talk to church members, and I found out I did need to do counseling! People all around me had difficulties in their marriages, with their children and at their jobs. They also faced personal emotional struggles, struggles for holiness and big questions about life.
Fast forward a few more years. I was in a church where I did a lot of premarital counseling. The premarital counseling opened doors for me to do marriage counseling with couples who were struggling with various issues. Unfortunately, one of the couples I did marriage counseling with was a couple that I had done premarital counseling with. After a short time being married, they began to have problems. I wish I could say that I helped them work through it, and they had a great marriage. They ended up getting divorced shortly thereafter. It was heartbreaking. I was convinced that I needed to be better prepared to counsel the people in my church.
But counsel them with what?
I have some philosophical and theological reasons I believe in biblical counseling. The phrase “eat the steak and spit out the bone” represents how I used to view information. I believed that I would be able to discern what was good and what was not. Once, I made this comment to an older pastor about something, and he replied to me, “If you eat poison, you will die.” I don’t know that I really understood what he was saying then, but I have come to believe that there are often things we “eat” and don’t know are poisonous — harmful assumptions, wrong views of people, etc.
Many popular ideas in modern counseling approaches are philosophical or theological statements about who God is, about who man is, about sin and salvation. These ideas about counseling are based on atheistic, humanistic and secular philosophies that attempt to cut God out of the picture. Even though these philosophies are based on ideas opposed to Christianity, many have been uncritically adopted by the church.
God has given us what we need to care for the people in our churches with wisdom! II Peter 1:3-8 says that God’s divine power has given us everything we need for life and godliness. Specifically, he has given us His precious promises. It is through them that we become partakers of the divine nature, and we overcome corruption and evil desires. Through them, we learn to grow in our faith, so that we will be effective and productive in our knowledge of Jesus Christ.
Besides the Scriptures, God gives His Spirit and the saints as the means of a godly life. This is the heart behind the Care of Souls Conference — equipping the church to shepherd one another with God’s Word, God’s Spirit and God’s people.
